1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a composition comprising primarily natural products and to its use in therapy, especially of genetic disorders, viral diseases, cancer and AIDS. The composition is also useful as a cosmetic.
2. Description of the Related Art
Despite decades of research, the treatment of cancer remains unsatisfactory. Surgery may be used to remove a solid tumour, but metastasis or recurrence of the cancer is common. Treatment with drugs, or chemotherapy, is usually non-specific, and is associated with undesirable side-effects, including damage to the immune system. Cell destruction by cytotoxic drugs follows first order kinetics, i.e. it reduces a constant percentage and not a constant number of cancer cells. Thus, the same dose which reduces the number of cancer cells from 108 to 107 is required to reduce the number from 103 to 102. Therefore, it is difficult to eradicate the last portion of any tumour solely by chemotherapy without causing serious toxicity.
Radiotherapy may be more localised, but is still dangerous to the patient and cannot avoid recurrence; the very localisation of the treatment means that there may be many cancerous or pre-cancerous cells that are unaffected by it, even if damage to healthy cells can be avoided. Surgery, radiation treatment and chemotherapy all leave residual tumour tissue following the completion of therapy. Both radiotherapy and chemotherapy depress the immune system of the patient which can in turn reduce the effectiveness of any treatment.
Similarly, the treatment of AIDS remains unsatisfactory. Drug treatment can provide some remission of symptoms, but is liable to cause side-effects. Thus, there is no effective long-term treatment. Further, the fact that AIDS patients are immuno-compromised remains a major problem for conventional therapy.
In addition to cancer and AIDS, there are many conditions that can only be addressed by chemotherapy associated with side-effects, owing to the unspecific nature of the drugs that are used. These conditions include skin diseases such as psoriasis, pemphigus and scleroderma. Further, there are veterinary conditions where there is no effective treatment, including Newcastle disease.
Conditions of the type described above may be associated with a genetic disorder, e.g. some failure in the process whereby genes are translated into proteins, in vivo. It is known that a change of just one amino acid in a protein may be associated with disease, e.g. as in sickle cell anaemia. Proliferative conditions and cancer, among others, may be associated with an error in the sequence of events leading from organisation of genes to production of protein.